Arles, says Murray, is famous for its beautiful women, ‘due to the Greek element which has never been lost. It is odd that not a trace of this should be found in the men.’ Augustus J. C. Hare recommends the Hôtel de Nord which, he says, is the best, being ‘very good and clean, with obliging landlady’. In 1848 Murray tells us that the man who keeps the Hôtel de Forum was once cook to Lord Salisbury; that the Hôtel du Nord was ‘improved, and tolerably comfortable’, and that the Hôtel du Commerce on the Quai was kept by the wife of one of the English engineers on the steamboats.
Hare also is not slow to comment on the women, who are perhaps ‘the most beautiful of any European city. With dark eyes and raven locks, they are generally majestic in carriage and figure. They are greatly adorned by the becoming costume of Arles — which is still, happily, almost universal — a black dress and shawl, with full white muslin stomacher, and a very small lace cap at the back of the hair, bound round with broad black velvet or ribbon, fastened with gold or jewelled pins.’ By 1930 the costume of the women was only seen on Sundays and holidays.
Henry James devotes two chapters to Arles. ‘There were two shabby inns, which compete closely for your custom. I mean by this that if you eject to go to the Hôtel du Forum, the Hotel du Nord, which is placed exactly beside it, watches your arrival with ill-concealed disapproval; and if you take the chances of its neighbour, the Hôtel du Forum seems to glare at you invidiously from all its windows and doors. I forget which of these establishments I selected; whichever it was, I wished very much that it had been the other.’
At a café the next afternoon, James observes that there sat ‘behind the counter a splendid mature Arlesienne, the handsomest person I had ever seen give change for a five-franc piece. She was a large quiet woman, who would never see forty again; of an intensely feminine type, yet wonderfully rich and robust, and full of a certain physical nobleness. Though she was not really old, she was antique; and she was very grave, even a little sad. She had the dignity of a Roman empress, and she handled coppers as if they had been stamped with the head of Caesar.’
The main reason why so many English went to the Mediterranean coast of France was that of health, and Marseilles was the gate through which they passed in order to get there. Dickens gave a graphic picture of its summer climate in Little Dorrit (1856), and Murray in 1848 was equally explicit: ‘From the margin of the old harbour, lined with quays, the ground rises on all sides, covered with houses, forming a basin or amphitheatre, terminating only with the encircling chain of hills. From this disposition of the ground, the port becomes the sewer of the city — the receptacle of all its filth, stagnating in a tideless sea and under a burning sun, until a S.E. wind produces that circulation in its waters which the tide would do on other seas. The stench emanating from it at times is consequently intolerable, except for natives …’
As a reminder of times past we are told: ‘The Lazaret owed its foundation to the fearful ravages of the plague at Marseilles in 1720, which carried off between 40,000 and 50,000 persons, half the population. Amidst the general despair, selfishness, and depravity which accompanied this dire calamity, many individuals distinguished themselves by their noble self-devotion. The streets soon became choked with dead, and of the galley-slaves, supplied at the rate of 80 a-week to conduct the dead-carts, none survived.’
Nor is one allowed to forget that at the Revolution, ‘which inflamed to madness the fiery spirits of the people of the south, Marseilles furnished, from the dregs of its own population and the outcasts of other countries, the bands of assassins who perpetrated the greater portion of the September massacres in Paris. The well-known hymn of Revolution, the Marseillaise, was so called because it was played by a body of troops from Marseilles marching into Paris in 1792.’
By 1880 Marseilles had become ‘a grand city in site and extent, and, excepting Paris, no town in France has been more improved since 1853, by the creation of streets, quarters, harbours, and public edifices etc.’ In spite of all that, the town did not merit the accolade of a stay of some time. Its climate was said to be delightful at certain seasons but, nevertheless, ‘in summer and autumn the heat is intense — the streets like an oven, so that it is scarcely possible to move abroad during the daytime, and all rest during the night is liable to be destroyed by mosquitoes.’
Going east along the coast, Murray found in 1848 that none of the hotels at Cannes were any good, though there was a comfortable one at Grasse, ‘where an invalid from Nice might put up with advantage during the months of March, as the place is well sheltered’. At Antibes, however, the hotels were so bad that travellers were advised to ‘stop outside the gates, and send in for horses; they will thus save time, and their carriage will escape the risk of accidents, in being twice dragged through the most odious streets.’
Hyères, the first place of importance beyond Toulon, became a desirable place to stay later in the century: ‘Pure water has been laid on to all parts of the town by a company. The authorities have become more careful in securing cleanliness and drainage. The mildness and dryness of its climate causes Hyères to be chosen as a winter residence for invalids, and renders it one of the best in Europe during the season.’ As for Cannes, for those who suffer from the sea-air, ‘producing often nervous irritability and want to sleep’, the villas on the north side of the town are recommended.
English doctors and bankers were as usual installed in the main towns to care for and cater to the many winter visitors. ‘Pattieson’s is a good shop for groceries and English stores.’ English and Scottish churches mushroomed as on a dank November dawn at home. Today, the condescending wrath towards fish-and-chip shops and Yorkshire-bitter bars set up for those who flock to places like Corfu and Benidorm — who cannot sleep well if the familiar wherewithal is not stowed in their bellies — is a snobbish response to the fact that the hoi-polloi can afford to get off the island at all. If the middle classes (what and whoever they are) can have their comforting appurtenances — which they hardly need to export, these days, because the local equivalents serve perfectly well and may indeed be welcomed as ‘local colour’ — why not the others? The middle classes would of course rather the yobbos stayed at home, playing kickshins and throwing up behind impeccable clapboard cottages lining the village green, instead of acting as evidence for the indigenous foreign population that respectable English tourists with the present-day Baedeker or Blue Guide might well have come out of the same unruly bucket a couple of generations back.
The English who travelled to or settled on the Riviera in the nineteenth century were, however, certainly responsible for some improvements in sanitation, though the French would undoubtedly have taken these in hand anyway as part of the general trend all over Europe. In this respect Cannes went up many notches in general estimation after 1848. ‘The drainage, formerly bad, is now considerably improved; many works have been already carried out, and others, more important, are about to be undertaken.’